Lemme Tell You A Story…

Hey there, Art Lovers! This month at the HotPixel Post-Production blog, we’ve started our Artist Spotlight series, where we periodically focus on the work of a talented artist whose work we love, and whom we think could bring their talents to an indie film production in various capacities – from art direction to marketing. February has been devoted to the work of LA artist, Barbie Brady, whose Drunk Bunnies have come to visit the HotPixel logo this month. This week, I posted an interview I did with her, where she discusses her work and what inspires it.

EXCERPT:

But for the past few years, she’s been focusing exclusively on creating and showing her art, most recently at a show with RAW Artists earlier this month. She works in various mediums, and much of her work incorporates personal ephemera – toy instructions, old bingo cards, Polish family bibles. She often spends hours “making paper,” selecting sections for use in her projects. “I love giving things a second life,” Brady says. “And I love [that] these are things from my life: my journal pages, my instructions from my toys. They’re not random things, and I think that adds an element of integrity to what I do.”

In fact, when she did the HotPixel logo this month, she insisted on incorporating technical specs that we actually use to create her bunny vision of our logo, preserving the integrity of the work she did for us.

So, we know what the ephemera says…but what do the bunnies say?

“They say: I love bunnies and I love drinking,” she jokes. But then she tells me about the real reason drunk bunnies are so important to her.

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, Episode 2 of Supergirl Radio dropped yesterday, and in it, we talk about the awesome, the amazing, the cheesetastic….Supergirl – The Movie! C’mon. You know you love Helen Slater as Supergirl and Faye Dunaway as Selena!

Description:

On this week’s Supergirl Radio, your hosts Teresa Jusino and Rebecca Johnson cover news items about CBS’ Supergirl TV series (including Helen Slater’s thoughts on the new show!), and discuss everyone’s favorite superhero guilty pleasure, Supergirl: The Movie, which was the first, live-action incarnation of Kara Zor-El. Join in on the fun as Teresa and Rebecca prepare for CBS’ Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist!

Hey there, everyone! I’m actually really excited about this month’s Hot List over at the HotPixel blog, as I had the chance to do a “Valentine’s-themed” interview with one of the coolest couples in independent film. I had the chance to sit down with producer, Allison Vanore and her husband, composer Rob Gokee, and we had a great chat about their careers, and how they navigate their relationship while handling massive workloads, all while promoting their latest collaboration, Love in the Time of Monsters, which drops TOMORROW.

EXCERPT:

When they first met up, it was strictly as friends, as Vanore was looking to network, and Gokee was going through a break-up.

“I had dropped off my ex-girlfriend at the airport to go visit, like, the guy she was leaving me to go date,” he says, laughing. “And then I had the meeting with [Allison], and then lunch with a friend.”

“He dropped her off, and met me on the same day!” Vanore adds, gleefully.

Their first professional collaboration was Solo: The Series. But as their professional relationship blossomed into romance, social media began to take notice. “People who knew us on Twitter saw us talking more and more,” Vanore says. “And once we started dating…everyone was watching. It felt like a public thing. People had somehow become invested.”

And yes, they had a wedding hashtag: #RAllieWed. You can still look up all the details of their live-tweeted wedding.

Hey there, everyone! As you all know, I’ve recently become the co-host on an awesome new podcast called Supergirl Radio, which will be focusing on the upcoming CBS Supergirl show starring Melissa Benoist, but for now – in our Season Zero – will be exploring the character in her many incarnations.

We premiered last week with Episode 0, our Meet the Hosts episode, where you get to know me and my co-host, Rebecca Johnson, and we talk about our histories with Supergirl, as well as with geekery in general.

Today, we launched Episode 1: Supergirl’s Origins, where Rebecca and I take you to Supergirl School to learn all about the character in her many incarnations. It’s a perfect episode for Supergirl newbies, as well as for people who already love the character, but have a couple of holes in their Supergirl experience, and want to know what versions they’re missing. And as always, we’ve got the latest news items about the Supergirl TV show.

Description:
On this week’s Supergirl Radio, your hosts Teresa Jusino and Rebecca Johnson cover news items about CBS’Supergirl TV series (including Stephen Amell’s speculations about a possible full-on DC TV Universe crossover!), and discuss the origins of the Supergirl character from her comics, animated, and live-action incarnations. Join in on the fun of celebrating and getting to know Kara Zor-el as Teresa and Rebecca prepare for CBS’ Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist!

When I was about 5 or 6, I paraded around the house – seriously, paraded. The rooms were all connected to each other in my family’s Corona, Queens apartment, so that I could go around the whole thing in a circle, and I marched around and around several times – chanting:

In search of old things! In search of old things! In search of old things!

I should explain that I come from an old family. Not Old Money – just old age-wise. I was the youngest of three children by fifteen years, which meant that my parents were much older than the parents of my peers, and had built up a history long before I was born. Whenever my Mom would clean (or whenever I’d snoop in the name of “playing”), old things would turn up: Photos, old clothes and jewelry, random artifacts of lives lived long before I ever existed. I was fascinated by these things, because as the (much) youngest, I was the furthest removed from their original context. Whenever one of these Old Things would turn up, I would immediately start to imagine how it was used in its glory days, before it ended up in the back of one of our closets, or in the jewelry box my mom never used.

I would give it a story. Where it came from, who it belonged to, what it meant. These stories would eventually go beyond my family and into the realm of uncharted islands, or royalty, or street-wise kids trading it to get by. Yeah, the stories I created weren’t always happy ones depicting perfect fantasy lives, but they were always adventurous, or fun – usually both – even if they included hardships or tragedies.

Hardships and tragedies make good stories. So do adventure and fun.

Anyway, there came a point where it seemed like our apartment had run out of story-treasure. I’d seen everything in the closets, everything in all the boxes, everything in all the cabinets. There was nothing left – no more unknown old things. But I wanted more! Old things were exciting and mysterious, especially when no one seemed to care about them except 5-year-old me, so there was no one else to ascribe meaning to them. To make them relevant again. That was my job.

By creating stories for them in my head, I was keeping them alive.

And so I chanted while marching around the Jusino apartment: In search of old things! In search of old things! In search of old things!

I remember my brother laughing at my ridiculousness. Hell, even I knew I was being a little ridiculous in my methods, but that didn’t make the search itself anything less than serious biddness. I explained my search to my brother and asked him if he had anything, and he told me he didn’t, but that he’d keep an eye out in case he saw anything.

After about 3-4 times around the apartment, I remember my mom telling me to give it a rest. :)

But that’s the thing – my family let me chant and march around the apartment a bit before telling me to stop. And while I don’t remember if I found any new Old Things in my search that day (I vaguely remember finding things that were technically “old,” but nothing with a sense of History), I do remember that my family let me search, loudly. They might not have understood why I had to march around the apartment looking for stories to tell, but they didn’t stop me either. Whether or not it was important to them, they knew it was important to me.

I see the world in stories. I’m fascinated by people, because each individual is a deep pool of stories to tell. I’m fascinated by places I’ve never been, because they each contain the stories of millions. I’m fascinated by found objects, because you don’t always know where they’ve come from, or how they got there, and there’s immense pleasure in making it up. In giving things life.

Next week, I hope to start telling even more stories. I’ll be starting a podcast – The Teresa Jusino Experience. Original, huh? :) In it, I’ll keep you posted on whatever news tidbits I’ve got going on in my writing life, and I’ll have a Teresopinion on some topic or other. But each episode will always end with a story. Because there’s nothing like telling stories to keep us alive.

The blog over at HotPixel Post Production is gonna have a lot of great, new features this year, and one of the features I’m most excited about is our new column, ASK OUR COLORIST, where our amazing Head Colorist, Anthony Harris (who’s done color for movies like Snow White and the Huntsman and Life of Pi), explains his craft. Periodically, he’ll talk about a different aspect of color correction, while I provide a glossary of all the technobabble. :) If you’re a new filmmaker, or even an established one who wants to understand your crew better, check this out!

EXCERPT:

Editor’s Note: I asked Anthony to explain how he, as a colorist, integrates visual effects (VFX) into his workflow as he works on a film. Here’s what he had to say:

Usually I do a neutral grade on a plate which is just using lift/gamma/gain with no keys or shapes or anything like that, and send it out to the VFX company. Or, when the visual effect is small, they can apply their effect on the plate, and then they send the raw image back to me and I can bring that plate the rest of the way.

A neutral grade basically says that I’m going to use a basic lift/gamma/gain corrections to put it in the neighborhood of the surrounding footage, and not do anything too dynamic to allow the VFX company to have the range to put their effect in it without clipping values or harming the plate in any way. And when I get it, I still have the range to make it look natural.

But if you’re talking about a big visual effects project where – maybe there’s a greenscreen or bluescreen, and the whole background is a visual effect – maybe I’ll do the foreground plate, then sort of massage the plate into the other plates when the shot comes back from visual effects. If the shot is very VFX heavy, there’s nothing I can really do ahead of time, so I’ll work on the rest of the project until the shots come in, and drop them into the surrounding footage.

PS – check out the work of my friend, Barbie Brady, as she is HotPixel’s Artist of the Month (another new feature!). You can see her take on the HotPixel logo now through March 2 when you visit the site!

Well, we’ve all made it! This is the last day I’ll be blogging about my Patreon page in this way. :) While I didn’t come close to my original goal of 25 Patrons in the first day (HA!), or my secondary goal of 10 Patrons in the first week, I have managed to average 1 new Patron a day! 5 days, 5 Patrons. That’s not bad at all! At this rate, I’ll have 34 by the end of February, 65 by the end of March….healthy, steady growth. As I hope this will be a long-term endeavor, I don’t mind at all if growth is slow and steady. We all know what wins the race, after all.:)

If you’d like to catch up, here are the previous 4 Reasons to Be a Patron:

And the fifth reason? Because Cinderellas can’t become Cinderellas without the help of their animal friends.

The other day, I got a tiny bit of “backlash” after promoting my Patreon page on a Facebook writing group of which I’m a member. It went a little something like this:

Backlash person: “If you don’t mind my asking, what “resources” do you require in order to keep writing scripts? I’ve been writing for ages and I’ve never needed additional financial support to do so. I just write when I’m not at work.”

Me:“That’s great! :) I was doing that for a long time, myself. However, I found that, when I had a full-time office “day job” I very often didn’t have the energy to go from 8 hours in front of a computer all day to switch gears and spend several more hours at home writing something that I then didn’t have time to adequately shop around and get paid for, because I was busy 9-5 when anyone I’d want to meet to potentially pay me for my writing would be available.

To answer your question specifically, the resources I require are money and time.

Point being, I want to be paid for my writing. (and I write other things in addition to scripts) I don’t want to write for free while doing something else. When I say I need financial support, what I mean is: I write, readers read and enjoy, readers pay me for my work, and the process starts all over again. I’m not simply talking about the physical act of writing. I’m talking about making it my living, and having the audacity to expect to be paid for it rather than continually doing it for free while killing myself working other jobs to support myself. I’ve done the day job/write on the side thing. I’m over it. I expect readers to pay writers for their work. It’s as simple as that.”

This person’s issue seemed to be that if they could be happy writing on the side while doing another job, then everyone should. Here’s why that doesn’t work for me:I don’t believe there’s any good reason why I should have to wait for a gatekeeper to put a stamp of approval on my work before it finds its way into the hands of people who’d like it. This doesn’t mean that I would never work for someone else, or go through a traditional gatekeeper. I’d LOVE to be staffed on a TV show, or have prose fiction published by a traditional publisher. I’m working towards those ends, too – did this person in the FB group believe that I was putting all my eggs entirely into this basket? I assure you all, I’m not! :)

This is not an anti-traditional anything screed. This is a statement against inaction while waiting around for some Fairy Godmother to make it all happen for you.

When Cinderella* wanted to go to the ball, she was told that she couldn’t go without a dress, and her stepmother wasn’t about to buy her one. SO SHE MADE ONE. Or rather, she started to. But then her wicked stepfamily (aka, her Day Job) continually kept her from it. So she got help from her friends. And even after that, her family tore the finished dress to shreds, but Cinderella’s effort got the attention of her Fairy Godmother, who saw that Cinderella was willing to put the work in, but needed a little push resources-wise to get where she needed to be.

Her goal was the ball. Mine is to be able to earn a livable income from what I write.

If I can make money by producing my own work in another way, why shouldn’t I? If there are people who already enjoy what I do, why shouldn’t I reach out to them directly? Why shouldn’t I, if possible, exchange my work for money without a hoard of intermediaries, each expecting a cut?

There are plenty of people who write, or create other art, “on the side,” or as a hobby, or “for themselves,” and that’s amazing! Art should be a part of everyone’s life in some way. But it makes no sense for someone who wants to be a professional artist to wait around for someone else to package, market, and sell them.

While you’re waiting for Simon and Schuster to take notice of your novel, compile those short stories you’ve got lying around into a self-published tome and sell them online, or at local flea markets, or at local open mics where you can do a reading. While you’re waiting for a big network or new media outlet to take a chance on your brilliant pilot, or a studio to take notice of your killer screenplay, create a digital series, or a podcast, or a short film to tell that story you want to tell, and figure out how to monetize it.

Nothing gets the attention of a Fairy Godmother (or an agent, or a publisher, or a network) quite like someone who’s already working to making it happen on their own. And the Fairy Godmothers always get the credit for magically transforming the Diamond in the Rough. But chances are, even if Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother never showed up, she would’ve stopped crying, and figured out another angle for the next ball.

Because anyone who knows their own worth, is kind to their friends (even if she can’t make them all little hats and shirts), and is willing to continue making things and working on their craft in the face of adversity won’t be kept down forever.

And that’s what Patreon is. It’s a home for Cinderellas making their own dresses for the ball.:) And as we know from the Disney film, Cinderella wouldn’t have been able to do it without her only friends – the mice, the dog, and other woodland creatures.

* That’s the Disney version. In the original Brother’s Grimm version, she did even MORE work to get to the ball, and got help from the animals and a magical tree. Oh, and haters get their eyes plucked out by pigeons.